Kirsty Williams calls for urgent action to match the words in new Assembly Government Sustainability Strategy

May 22, 2009 9:48 AM

Commenting on the launch of the Assembly Government's new Sustainable Development Strategy, Kirsty Williams, leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, said: "The Welsh Assembly government has a legal duty to promote sustainable development, so we've seen lots of wordy, green sounding strategy documents before. What's more important is the moral imperative on Government to act now. For the past decade we've seen a Government that tells us to recycle, or save energy in one breath but subsidises flights or expands the M4 in the next breath. This incoherence has to end now, or Wales will be left a deeply unsustainable place, with communities over-exposed to oil price and availability pressures, fractured by economic inequalities and exposed to the significant risks of climate change." Echoing Jonathan Porritt's assertion that Wales can set a global example, if action matches the rhetoric within the new strategy, Kirsty Williams said: "Labour have two more years to show that they have the guts to take this agenda forward, to make tough decisions and break from the lazy growth-at-all-costs developmental mindset of recent years. Just as the credit crunch means Government must show honesty about cuts in public services, the climate and oil crunch demands honesty about the scale of change required. For example, the Welsh Liberal Democrats favour adopting 9% annual carbon emission reductions as sound science tells us, instead of using token 3% targets because that's what Labour and Plaid Ministers are comfortable with. Rhodri Morgan says we must change 'within the lifetime of a generation' - we can only hope he's talking about his generation, or this Government will go down in history as the ones who passed the buck on all our futures."